Poetzlinger’s music book

Poetzlinger’s music book (now » D-Mbs Clm 14274), known as the „St. Emmeram Codex“, is one of the most important sources of late-medieval polyphonic music to have survived from Central Europe. It contains nearly 250 pieces of music, including works by many of the leading composers of the time, such as Francesco Landini, Guillaume Du Fay, Gilles Binchois, John Dunstaple and Leonel Power, as well as others by composers whose reputation was more local, such as Hermann Edlerawer (» G. Hermann Edlerawer; » Abb. Edlerawer in D-Mbs Clm 14274), Rudolf Volkhardt von Häringen (» C. Musiktheorie) and Peter Schweikl. Many of these works are otherwise unknown, and would therefore have been lost to us if it had not been for Poetzlinger. The same is even more true of most of the anonymous music that forms the bulk of the collection, some of which can be shown to have come from Bohemia, or at least to have been well known there. Much of the music in the first two of the three sections of the manuscript was copied by Poetzlinger himself, apparently during and immediately after his time as a student at Vienna, though he was substantially helped in the second section by another scribe whose hand can also be identified in some of Poetzlinger’s text manuscripts from c.1439, including his bible. The third and latest section of the manuscript was added by Wolfgang Chranekker, who was organist at St. Wolfgang am Abersee in 1441, but is also documented as a chaplain at the altar of Corpus Christi in the church of St. Ulrich, Regensburg, in 1448 (» C. Organisten und Kopisten).